Recently read
John Fante's The Brotherhood of the Grape - This being the 5th book by him I've read, one could say he has become one of my favorite writers.
which lead me to read
Bukovski's Ham on Rye

Incidentally both books heavily deal with father-son relationship, which made me thing of my father, and the fact...that we have a rather good but boring relationship, nothing to write a book about.

What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire by Daniel Bergner... which despite the horribly misleading title is not a self-help pick up book (I knew that before I got it), but a rather interesting look at female sexuality or rather socity's view of it. It has some interesting points, some interesting research...too many anecdotal stuff but even those parts are rather well written. The book's isn't life changing but it does raise interesting discussion topics._________________Tsosm! Hydrogen fuel and Grumpy Cat coffee

"One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.

His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.

For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore."

Kind of makes me want to read the whole thing. Or at least see the movie adaption. As a side note Wallace Shawn is also the voice behind Rex in Toy Story._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Did everyone hear that FOX picked up the rights to the Kingkiller Chronicles (Name of the Wind/Wise Man's Fear)? Should be interesting..._________________Eureka00: "Reminding you of your addictions" since 1982.

21. Would be a little higher but I didn't count the things I started and never finished (Dark Tower series).

I've only read 54 of them. Many of the rest hold no interest for me, but some I would consider reading. And I think they left out some better books than they included. Where's David Brin?_________________The reward for a good life is a good life.

21. Would be a little higher but I didn't count the things I started and never finished (Dark Tower series).

36 (if you count the short story version of "ender's game")- but a surprising large part of that is authuriana. i'm a bit disturbed by the number of classics i _haven't_ read (like, apparently, most of asimov's stuff). (i've read some asimov, but apparently none of the classics).

some of there choices do seem odd. i've read connie willis' the doomsday book (because i likes to say nothing of the dog) but i really hated it - there were so many gaping holes in the story.

Also 36, and I call shenanigans on the selection process. No Glen Cook? No Allen Steele? The only Jim Butcher book is not a Dresden files book?_________________The older I get, the more certain I become of one thing. True and abiding cynicism is simply a form of cowardice.